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Dean Young, Ekgy on Toy Piano, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. $12.95, paper (ISBN 0-8229-5872-4), 104 pages.
Reviewed by Mary Austin Speaker
Dean Young doesn't like labels, but nevertheless, he has been called a surrealist, a comedian, an experimental poet, a humanist. He is alternately all of these things, infusing poetry with humor, sadness, confusion and awe. In his latest collection, Ekgy on Toy Piano, he allows the big subjects (death, love, and memory) to inform the poems without overwhelming them-they become as alien and mysterious as some of his more esoteric images, and as plain and sad as more pedestrian ones. Treating big subjects in such a way allows the poems to occupy a particular tonal register-one complex and seductive, hilarious and intensely moving. The tone of these poems maps the complexity of the distracted human psyche: they explore the interstices between moments of self-assuredness, shifting rapidly from neurotic and dizzy to lucid and resigned. In other words, they are notes from a life lived with the kind of consideration that would drive most people crazy.
Young successfully makes normalized experience appear strange and strangely moving in Elegy on Toy Piano. In "Venus," for example, Young appreciates the startling and gratifying variety of the beloved, the way it appears unexpectedly in places as remote as planets, as near as spark plugs, as familiar as the "girlfriend of my best friend." And even for those well-versed in the pedantic and performative habits of contemporary poetic schools of thought, Young's work makes familiar practice slightly uncomfortable. In "Whose Side U On, Anyway?" Young reminds us of the inherent categorical ridiculousness of poetic hierarchies (membership in the Academy of American Poets, for example, or even being labeled "avant garde"). The poems in Elegy do not provide answers, but they do acknowledge the gravity and awkwardness of certain questions. Where does our experience go and how can we regard it? If there is a place to acknowledge the vibrancy and clamor of the...